Alice Cooper isn’t ‘Anti-Trans’ – the Mainstream Media is Anti-Truth
The rock legend has often joked about being the "villain of rock-n-roll," but the accusations of bigotry leveled at him are a serious misrepresentation of his views and distortion of his values.
Last week, rock legend Alice Cooper participated in a podcast to promote his latest record, Road. When the host asked for his opinion on the trans phenomenon, his candid yet innocuous comments ignited a media firestorm.
What he said was factual, and out of concern for the health and safety of women and children. But like many others, he underestimated the insanity of the current cultural landscape.
Whenever a celebrity ventures outside of the dominant narrative, it triggers a flurry of articles from various news outlets and online magazines, lobbing insults and accusations at the new heretics. For those unaccustomed to enduring media pile-ons, it can be completely overwhelming. It’s no wonder that so many choose to walk back their statements and apologize.
Smelling blood in the water, the media descended into another feeding frenzy when a no-name cosmetics company with 427 Twitter followers saw an opportunity to elevate its profile by announcing the end of their make-up collaboration with the rock icon over his comments.
Coop, as he is affectionately known to friends and family, did not deserve to be maligned in the press. But telling the truth has consequences if it conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy on sensitive politicized issues.
The abject failure of mainstream media journalists to objectively and accurately report on trans issues is the reason I started looking into it further, and is ultimately why I became a journalist. I now cover this issue exclusively to provide people with the much needed context that is missing.
Since becoming a journalist, Reuters has notably elevated its coverage with its Youth in Transition series, and even The New York Times has finally begun at least acknowledging the problems with pediatric gender medicine, such as their recent piece on the St. Louis gender clinic whistleblower — albeit six months after the story first emerged. However, this doesn't make up for the broader media landscape's shortcomings, particularly its trend of employing activists over real journalists dedicated to impartial truth-seeking.
The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe false information solely because it is repeatedly told. Every time a new celebrity deviates from the established orthodoxy, media outlets bombard their readers with the same repurposed drivel over and over again, and it’s no different with the articles about Coop. I read about a dozen such articles and analyzed the recurring themes.
Nearly all of the articles referred to his comments as “anti-trans.” This is a sleazy tactic called poisoning the well. By branding him as bigoted, they taint the audience’s perception and make them less receptive to his point of view. They do this of course while completely mischaracterizing his statements.
Much of the commentary included blaming his sentiments on contributing to “anti-trans legislation.” What they don’t want you to know is that the states placing age restrictions on medical transition services are more in line with what several European countries have done after performing systematic evidence reviews on child transition, finding that the known risks greatly outweighed any potential benefits. There is no quality evidence that transitioning children improves their mental health or prevents suicide.
As public health agencies in Finland, Sweden, England, Norway, and now Denmark back away from child transition, and other countries like France, Ireland, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand have started reevaluating their stances, the United States is quickly becoming an global outlier for their reluctance to align their guidelines with the best available evidence.
One of the most eye-rolling themes to emerge was the snark directed at Coop by journalists who thought they were highlighting the irony in his remarks, seen as dismissive towards trans people, given his long history of defying traditional gender conventions by donning stage makeup and a feminine name. But the joke is on them because today’s gender dogma would insist this expression makes him less of a man and more likely a woman or perhaps even “non-binary.”
The 1970s celebrated a "free to be… you and me" ethos, and gender-bending rock stars like Alice Cooper had a positive influence on culture, empowering individuals of either sex to express themselves uninhibitedly through clothing and style.
Today, children are taught the exact opposite. Instead of teaching children to embrace their individuality, gender ideologues reinforce regressive stereotypes by insisting that if girls like boy things, they must really be a boy; and if boys like girl things, they must really be a girl.
Kids are taught that they could be “born in the wrong body” and that the body can be “corrected” to match the “gender identity” through extreme hormonal and surgical body-modification procedures. The mainstreaming of this belief system has coincided with an exponential increase in the number of children receiving transgender medical care.
Where does this regressive ideology originate? To my surprise, Rolling Stone mentioned it by name, lamenting that Coop wasn’t “super well-versed in gender theory.” In the two years I've been deeply engaged with this issue, among the countless articles I've perused, I can scarcely recall mainstream media explicitly referencing “gender theory.” Perhaps this omission stems from a concern that if their readership truly understood it, they wouldn’t support it.
Gender Theory is a framework of Gender Studies in university Humanities departments that came to prominence in the 1990s, which substitutes a scientific understanding of biology with an individual’s self-determined “gender identity.” Few understand just how intellectually bankrupt and steeped in pseudoscience that many disciplines in the Humanities are – a scholarship that is so unrigorous, it has been hoaxed several times.
In 2015 Civil Rights and Gay Rights organizations packaged and popularized the ideas from Gender Theory and mainstreamed them to the public through aggressive campaigning. Why? Because, after gay marriage was (thankfully) legalized nationwide, they had to pivot to a new cause to champion so that they could remain open for business. In order to retain donors and secure funding, these organizations selected “transgender rights” as the next civil rights cause.
Unsurprisingly, many of the articles directed their readers to GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), two of the biggest purveyors of gender pseudoscience. These extremely powerful and influential entities have worked hard to exploit public sympathy for gay rights in order to conceal the radical nature of “trans rights.”
They’ve even gone as far as to insist trans people were also “born that way” to obtain protections for “gender identity” in law. However, no empirical evidence exists to support a biological basis for “gender identity.” Currently, there is no brain, blood, or other objective test that can detect “gender identity” or otherwise distinguish a trans-identified from a non-trans identified person.
If “gender identity” were solely biologically ingrained, it would conflict with the fact that gender dysphoria has been observed to resolve spontaneously or through psychotherapy at various ages. As we know from the growing population of detransitioners and a large body of research that finds approximately 85% of children outgrow their gender-related distress, transgender identities are not necessarily fixed.
This also means that the entire narrative surrounding “transgender children” is a lie. Kids are not born transgender, they’re made – usually by parents who think they’re doing what’s best for their child, but they could be setting them up for a life of medical dependency and serious health risks. Transitioning is a decision for informed adults to make, but healthcare providers are actively misinforming their patients about the nature of their condition, stripping them of their ability to give “informed consent” for these treatments.
Detransitioners who have been irrevocably harmed by the affirming model of care are almost completely ignored by legacy media. They’re often dismissed as a minority, but their numbers are growing. A recent comprehensive review of medical records found that 30% of teens and young adults discontinued hormone use after 4 years and a forum for detransitioners now has 50,000 members, adding roughly 1,000 members per month.
Gender dysphoria is an extremely rare psychiatric condition that afflicted 1 in 20,000 people a decade ago – it is not a medical condition one is born with. Today, 1 in 71 American teens identify as transgender, a number that has doubled in the last five years. Some school districts in urban areas report that over 9% of their student body identify as something other than their sex. The vast majority of pediatric gender clinic referrals are adolescent girls with severe mental health issues, autism, and no prior history of gender-related distress.
By insinuating that trans identity is socially influenced – as Alice Cooper did by saying that not all, but many who have adopted transgender identities are participating in a “fad” – it challenges the narrative that activist groups have worked so hard to cultivate. They are so committed to these beliefs, they have even called for the censorship of evidence that contradicts it. Appearing as though in unison, the media apparatus orchestrates a smear campaign to discredit those that deviate from the prescribed discourse.
Researchers Lisa Littman and Michael Bailey, along with journalists Abigail Shrier and Helen Joyce, have faced wrath in the press, largely for emphasizing the peer influence of trans-identification. Yet, the concept of social contagion is a well-established phenomenon in psychological literature. Notably, adolescents, especially females, are susceptible to its effects, as seen in behaviors like self-harming and eating disorders.
Most media outlets readily recognize social contagion's role in other youth trends. For instance, the rise of “TikTok tics” saw teenagers developing physical and verbal tics with no known biological cause after viewing TikTok influencers with Tourette’s syndrome. Another trend includes the resurgence of the extremely rare Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) — where individuals believe they possess multiple personalities — also inspired by TikTok.
But acknowledging the social influence of trans-identities in the current political climate is heresy. Activists and progressive journalists favor the societal acceptance narrative, insisting that the meteoric rise in transgender identification among Generation Z results from a more tolerant and inclusive society that embraces “gender diversity.”
However, paradoxically, these same activists also depict America as harboring unparalleled hostility towards those who identify as trans. They seldom miss a chance to remind their readers that trans-identified people are the victims of an “epidemic” of violence, even though the data does not substantiate this claim.
Males who self-identify as women have unfettered access to women’s restrooms, locker rooms, domestic violence shelters, sports, and correctional facilities. And while not all exploit gender self-identification policies, there have been incidents of indecent exposure, voyeurism and sexual assaults by transgender women – but mainstream media almost never reports on it.
Instead, they often deny that it happens at all, and dismiss it as a “widely debunked” myth and “right-wing talking point.” However, research contradicts this narrative as well. A study conducted by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) found that 92% of incarcerated transgender women had committed violent offenses and 46% were sexual offenders.
Many journalists seem to take pleasure in scoffing at the "debunked idea that children are identifying as cats." They describe it as "false claims proliferated by anti-trans politicians and activists," pointing to a New York school superintendent's denial that a litter box was provided to accommodate a child who identified as a cat.
However, there have been other reports of children in schools adopting non-human identities, including that of a cat. A simple foray into TikTok to search for the hashtag “neopronouns,” which has garnered 607.7 million views, reveals a vast variety of non-human identities that adolescents and young adults are embracing.
Just last week, CNN was ridiculed for publishing a guide to neopronouns, which include “nounself pronouns” and an example of how to use “leafself” pronouns… perhaps if you identify as a leaf?!
An excerpt:
“For someone who uses the nounself pronoun ‘leaf,’ that may look like: ‘I hope leaf knows how proud we are that leaf is getting to know leafself better!’ or ‘Leaf arrived at the coffee shop before me; I was mortified to have been late to meet leaf.’” (their emphasis).
Coop faced criticism for describing these ideas as "absurd." He’s right. And if you don’t believe things haven’t gotten out of hand, you haven’t been paying attention. Coop’s views on trans issues resonate with a majority of Americans. Recent surveys indicate a shift in public opinion, with the dominant transgender narratives experiencing waning support.
For instance, a new 2023 Gallup poll indicated that 69% of Americans believe transgender athletes should only compete in sports teams aligned with their birth sex, a rise from 62% in 2021. Similarly, a 2023 Washington Post-KFF poll showed that almost seven out of ten adults disapprove of giving children between the ages of 10 and 14 medications to halt puberty, while nearly 60% oppose hormone treatments for 15- to 17-year-olds.
Furthermore, data from a 2022 Pew Research Poll revealed that 60% of respondents believe one's gender is determined by their sex at birth, an increase from 54% in 2017. Lastly, a New York Times/Siena Poll reported that a significant 70% of those surveyed were against elementary school teachers leading classroom discussions on “gender identity.”
While mainstream media outlets may believe they can continue their deceitful practices, it appears the average American is more discerning. People are finding ways of accessing better information, no thanks to them.
Even at 75, Coop remains indefatigable, touring annually with the Alice Cooper Band and enthralling fans with his iconic hits and theatrical performances. Beyond his musical contributions, he is deeply philanthropic. His charitable ventures range from performing to raise funds for children’s hospitals to establishing the Solid Rock Teen Center, which operates two locations offering free after-school training for teens in music, art, and dance.
Encouraging teens to cultivate hobbies and skills that boost their self-esteem is what they desperately need – far more so than indulging in the unhealthy narratives and “sick-role subcultures” prevalent in mental health communities on TikTok.
Coop has often joked in interviews about his stage persona being the “villain of rock-n-roll,” or a Captain Hook figure among a sea of Peter Pans, but the accusations of bigotry leveled at him are a serious misrepresentation of his views and distortion of his values. Until journalists start doing their jobs and critically examining some of these narratives, they’ll continue to misinform their readership and slander innocent people like Alice Cooper.
Great piece!
School’s
Been blown
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Pieces